April 19, 1996--On my way up the opening of
Katharina Fritsch's show at Matthew Marks
on Madison Avenue [Apr. 20-June 8, 1996], I
read on Page Six of the New York Post an
item about the demimonde photographer Nan
Goldin and some friends getting into a
fight over her taking place at the Tribeca
topless bar, the Baby Doll Lounge. It said
she was hauled down to the police station.
This is legendary Goldin.
Fritsch is showing 36 silk-screen
enlargements on extremely white paper of
cartoon-like line drawings that had served
as illustrations in a 1936 German
children's encyclopedia. They all have
shiny, curved silver frames and no glass.
Fritsch has grouped them together by
categories, making single works out of
multiple panels. So, for instance,
Superstitions is one work consisting of
four identically framed panels with
illustrations of "Fortune Telling,"
"Flagellators" and two more. Other works
are Family Celebrations,Popular
Celebrations and Church. There are two
fairy-tale pieces, each with seven
silkscreened panels. A volume of Grimm's
Fairy Tales, with different illustrations,
is conveniently provided on a table in the
second room.
So, we have a children's book illustration
of the wolf talking to Little Red Riding
Hood on the path to Grandmother's house, or
a May Day Celebration, or Communion at
Church, or Christmas and so on. Fritsch's
compendium is undoubtedly a fascinating
sociological document with many inferences
to be made. But for me, the work is about
her act of choosing and her presentation.
There is a dynamic theatrical effect in the
gallery rooms. The 36 illustrations are put
on display. Their scale is enlarged and
enhanced through grouping and repetition of
format. She used this technique in a show I
saw at the Basel Kunsthalle in 1988 curated
by Jean Christoph Ammann with Fritsch and
Rosemarie Trockel. Fritsch filled a huge
hall with a big installation of a very long
table at which were seated a considerable
number of identical white figures of men
dressed in black with black fedoras.
Society stamping out identical models.The
Organization Man.
It is interesting that Katharina Fritsch is
showing here within a month of Rosemarie
Trockel's drawing show downtown [see
below]. They have been compared in the
past. In fact, they are probably the two
most important German women artists of
their generation, and they have very
contrasting temperaments. Trockel's show is
also about German ritual, but is a very
different, funny and quirky vision of it.
It is the vision that is lived in all its
complicated messiness; one that doesn't fit
into perfectly ordered groups. Trockel and
Fritsch represent two poles of German art
that are analogous to the divide between
Polke and Richter. One conjures and invents
coincidence, while the other is colder,
more calculated, but also very smart.
On the fifth floor of the Marks Gallery,
Fritsch is showing a retrospective of her
multiples, some of which are produced in
seemingly unlimited editions and have
bargain basement prices for you poor
collectors. Some are sold, typically for
Fritsch, only in groups.
April 6, 1996--I first met Jack Pierson
about six years ago while I was hanging out
for an afternoon in Donald Baechler's
studio. Now you can hang out in Pierson's
studio--or at least in his "Studio for a
Month," an installation in the front room
of Luhring Augustine [Apr. 6-May 4, 1996].
On the first day of the show, the Saturday
before Easter, pink and white lilies filled
the room with the sweetest fragrance. A
frayed, cheap Indian bedspread hangs like a
curtain in the entrance. The floor and
walls of the studio tableau are painted
pale pink. In the room are three odd chairs
and an old striped hand-woven textile on
the floor. A couple of small wooden boxes
hold a portable stereo player, an ashtray
and some books: a Polke catalogue; "All of a
Sudden" by Jack Pierson published by
PowerHouse Books Thea Westreich; the
magazine "Out" with Philip Johnson on the
cover. Above the table are shelves holding
photographic prints and various other
things, including a box of Milk Bone dog
biscuits. Pinned to the wall is a large
photocopy of Jimmy Durante and a copy of a
bad review of Pierson's 1995 Chicago show
that called his work "retro."
On opposite walls, spelled out in
mismatching letters from signs, are two
wall pieces:Jesus Christ and Jerry Lewis.
A plywood table sits in the room holding
the flowers, a bowl of oranges, postcards,
a rubber eraser, some notebooks, a boxed
portfolio of large color prints with a
series of off-center close-ups of a young,
good looking Italian male fashionably
unshaven, a box of pins and a pair of white
gloves.
When Jack was in the room you felt like his
guest. When he wasn't there, you felt like
an invited voyeur looking for things that
might be interesting. A small spiral
notebook I uncovered under a pile had words
and phrases from a Hollywood-hotel stay
scrawled across each page in a dark soft
pencil. A different notebook had pages that
said "Cootch," Bad Tit Job," "Burlesque,"
"Only God Above Knows How I Feel" and "Over
the Hill and Looking for Love."
Pierson uses language to name things in a
way that reminded me of Jean-Michel
Basquiat, despite Jean's more deliberate
and poetic stroke. "Only God Above Knows
How I Feel" is a twist on that. Pierson
shies away from casting judgment. He leaves
that to God or to us. Rather, he plays on
his unassuming coyness to create desire.
It's a pose, but he is very good at it.
There is a large framed drawing leaning
against the wall near the exit of a thin
girl with long dark hair, who's wearing
across her mouth an elegant black mask for
the eyes. A caption scrawled out above her
reads, "I'm not who you think I am, and I
hate you, too."
When I walked into the main gallery, Ada
and Alex Katz were there, looking at
Pierson's wispy, landscape-like large
canvases. They are machine-made, painted
with acrylic lacquers by a computer-
controlled spray-gun from a scan of one of
Pierson's photographs of Bougainvillea,
ivy, the soft focus shadow of a chain link
fence, or a wall. The colors are
understatedly beautiful in their emptiness.
The technique and size leaves unnecessary
shadows and shapes that are like whitish
ghosts. Jeff Koons and Joseph Nechvatal are
two artists that have made work using this
computerized technique. Bougainvillea is
named for the French navigator Louis
Antoine de Bougainville (d. 1811).
Pierson's canvases are named for Mae West
Songs:Franky and Johnny,Sister Honky
Tonk,Thats All Brother and Slow Down. They
come in small editions. I like them. There
is a sign piece that runs across the
entrance of the gallery that reads, "Being
Alive." A friend of mine thought the whole
show was romantic.
Mar. 16, 1996--Went to a small reception
for a show of drawings and photographs by
the German artist, Rosemarie Trockel, at
Nolan-Eckman in the 560 Broadway building
[to Apr. 27, 1996]. Walk in and you see two
photographs, one in color and one in black
and white, of an unshaven critic, Wilfried
Dickoff, wearing a long thin plastic
Pinocchio nose and a towel or shroud over
his head. Right away you know something
funny is going on here. Ostensibly, the
show is images of the Cologne Carnival, but
is more than that. There are three drawings
of featureless faces except for long
Pinocchio-like noses in a dark grayish ink
wash. Then there are three drawings of
poodles. Then photographs, one in color and
one in black and white, of a man wearing
pajamas and a white sleeping cap standing
in front of an alley. He looks like an
escaped mental patient or Vincent "The
Chin" Gigante, the reputed Mafia don who
runs around the West Village in his
bathrobe. Then there are two drawings of
faces with spirals for features, six or
seven protrusions for noses and one with a
sucked-in mouth. They look like they could
have been done by Henri Michaux in one of
his drug-induced states. Then there were
intricate, obsessive drawings of what look
like fine chain-mail, mostly in pencil, but
partly in color. Another photograph shows a
little girl who seems to be protecting
herself from all this madness with the hood
of her purple parka. A line drawing of a
baby's face looks quite normal except for a
deep disturbing red spreading down from the
top of her head. There are photographs,
again one in color and one in black and
white, of a young woman with a black eye
and a bruised mouth standing beneath a
"sheltering" blue and grey sky.
Things in this show are and are not what
they seem. The mental patient turns out to
be someone whose kids Rosie had baby-sat a
long time ago and ran into by chance when
he was dressed up trying to look funny for
the Carnival. He was standing in front of
her house, which was the coincidence that
initiated this piece. A strange play-acting
is going on. The black-eyed woman is not
the real thing, as in a Nan Goldin photo,
but staged with makeup. When you look
closely at an ink drawing of a naked man
with a couple of extra feet drawn to the
side, you see that a hand rubbing one eye
is the hand of a skeleton. My favorite is
an ink-wash drawing of a big-eared monkey
with a giant tear coming out of one eye.
David Sher remarked that the tear looked
like it had a sailboat inside of it.
Trockel tests our alertness. It turns out,
things are and art not what they seem.
Contradictions, in this case, illuminate
the force of life itself.
Donald Baechler, Christopher Wool, Vincent
Fremont, Barbara Gladstone and Paul Kasmin
were among the attendees at a small private
reception. Rosie seemed sanguine and
perspicacious.
Mar. 6, 1996--Out doing the SoHo rounds
when I met by chance Artist Space curator
Anastasia Aukeman coming out of the Paul
Kasmin gallery on Grand Street, where
Bianca Sforni's black-and-white photographs
of oysters on the half shell, suffused in
saltwater and juices, look sexy and wet.
Anastasia wanted to see the Ellen Cantor
show at Thomas Nordanstad, but neither us
knew where his new space was located.
Instead we walk through the freezing, wind-
swept rain to around the corner to her
favorite neo-Conceptual gallery, Stefan
Basilico Fine Arts.
Stefan didn't know where Nordanstad was
either. He was having a meeting with Mario
Diacono, the Italian thinker and gallerist
who, in 1961, was signed and authenticated
as a work of art by Piero Manzoni.
Basilico was showing Mathew Antezzo
(covered by Robert Mahoney in "Reviews").
My favorite work of Antezzo's is an oil
painting from his previous exhibition, a
copy of a photograph of Alan Sonfist's Last
Piece (proposed 1973), Artist's Body Placed
at Death in a Sealed Transparent Enclosure.
"I feel that the decay and growth of my
body will present the continuance of my
artwork," Sonfist said. Antezzo titled his
painting, An Authentic and Historical
Discourse on the Phenomenon of Mail Art,
Art in America, vol. 61, #18, p. 54. A
conceptual precedent for Damien Hirst's
decomposing cows in tanks.
A couple of doors down Wooster Street at
American Fine Arts were Moyra Davey's
photographs of collections of books,
buttons and magazines. They're presented
framed in groups, on shelving, in boxes or,
in one case, just stacked up in a bathroom
by the toilet. This show provoked a
conversation about collections, lost and
saved, the problem of storage and the
inevitability of life to stuff. The back
room had that outrageous sculpture by Mark
Dion of a tree with dead animals hanging
from its branches, a cat, a rat, birds--the
whole thing tarred and feathered. Amidst
all the noisy backroom goings on,
hardworking Colin de Land told us that
Thomas Nordanstad is at Spring and Hudson.
We trudged westward through the rain but
there was no gallery in sight. Windblown
and exasperated, we asked a wise and
wizened concierge at 304 Hudson, who
directed us to the southwest corner of the
intersection, above the deli. Alas, the
door was locked with a notice that read
"Closed." We never saw the Ellen Cantor
show, but I understand it was about sex.
In order to salvage something from this wet
westward walk we headed toward Gavin
Brown's Enterprise on Broome. Taking a
circuitous route in order to avoid the
onrushing traffic of the Holland Tunnel,
we arrived to find a warm, dry room
with a black foam-covered bench
facing two TVs, one on a refrigerator
filled with beer and the other on a wooden
box containing, among other things, a
bottle of single-malt Scotch. The video
playing was by Dinos and Jake Chapman, who
apparently had hired porno actresses to
have sex with their sculpture, which is a
life-sized head with a erect penis for a
nose. Pornography or art? I couldn't tell
you. Michiko Kakutani in her review of A.
M. Homes' novel,The End of Alice, (New
York Times, Feb. 23, 1996) cites Nabokov's
comment on pornography: "action has to be
limited to the copulation of clichés." In
this case you decide. For us it was funny
and a fitting end to the afternoon.